Amy Kosh

I am interested in what we often ignore or choose to overlook, pushing the viewer toward perceiving those things which may at first seem to be the less important aspects. They are not "safe" places to be: to enter or exit the work may require effort, and often it is uncertain where we stand within the image. This uncertainty forces us to remain open to the experience, and perhaps more willing to "see" what is there, instead of relying on our patterned assumptions.

The visual world has never been a static thing for me. It twists and turns, it unforgivingly dives into seemingly deserted canyons with their guarded secrets and valleys, or rises sweeping upward past the eye-line in an arc which hangs above one's head. It moves and breathes the way animals do, merely doing so in a slower time-frame. It requires something of us, asking us to understand what is happening before us. We often think of our world as unwavering, and often subconsciously ignore the movement of time or the marks of alteration.

The works derive from ideas about that modulation of the experience of seeing. The objects in the world are the things to which we attach meaning. Rarely are we willing to just look with an open mind toward experiencing what is there in front of us. We come to it with our notions about what is important to notice and what we can ignore. We don’t stand and gaze without turning to see some view or another, and so the land and all within it are shifted across our vision. When we look back to the initial view, something has changed. The particular moment is gone and the colours are slightly darker, lighter, or brighter, the shapes have been moved by a breeze or the rain falling onto the ground creating new mud-circles. A new pattern forms within what we consider to be an unchanging scene.